A Couple of Random Thoughts on Islamic Jihad

1. There are now reports that as many as 800 French Muslims are fighting with the Islamic State. This figure is added to an estimate of 300 from the US, 500 from the UK, 400 from Germany, 150 from Australia and 130 from Austria. There is a report of 22 from one mosque in Denmark alone. Estimates indicate that fully 10% of IS fighters are Turks, which would put the number at 2,000.

Little Tunisia says that 1,300 of its citizens are fighting with IS. There are of course known Chechans, Malaysians and Indonesians fighting for IS (a mosque in Indonesia was distributing IS recruiting literature).

And let’s not forget that Boko Haram, Abu Sayyaf and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula have all pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.

This isn’t happening spontaneously. All of these Jihadis didn’t just all of a sudden visit a web site and decide to drop everything and head to Iraq and Syria.

There is an Islamic Underground in the West that was activated to get recruits and support for IS, a 5th Column. It is efficient and robust, because Muslims by the thousands have answered this call to head to an area many couldn’t find on a map to participate in Jihad.

Moreover, the way that the Obama administration and the US State Department keep referring to IS as a “regional” problem is positively maddening and frightening. It is nothing of the such and denying the Islamic State’s global reach is no small matter.

2. de Tocqueville compares Islam to Christianity:

From Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville, 1840.

“Mahommed professed to derive from Heaven, and he has inserted in the Koran, not only a body of religious doctrines, but political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and theories of science. The gospel, on the contrary, only speaks of the general relations of men to God and to each other — beyond which it inculcates and imposes no point of faith. This alone, besides a thousand other reasons, would suffice to prove that the former of these religions will never long predominate in a cultivated and democratic age, whilst the latter is destined to retain its sway at these as at all other periods.”

de Tocqueville nailed Islam way back in 1840. The question is, will his prediction of the outcome prove correct? Or will Western weakness and recalcitrance result in an outcome tragically different from what he forecast?